‘Sunshine’ a well-deserved hit

One of the themes at Oscar time this year was the disconnect between the movies critics liked and the movies people actually went to see. The five Best Picture nominees (“Brokeback Mountain,” “Crash,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” “Munich” and “Capote”) combined to make about, oh, half of what the last “Star Wars” movie earned.

But in “Little Miss Sunshine,” we have the right mix of art and commerce. The tale of a spectacularly dysfunctional family on a road trip to a kiddie beauty pageant in an unreliable yellow VW bus is as good as Larry Ratliff says it is (he gave it the coveted four jalapenos). All the characters have their good and bad points, and their quirks don’t seemed forced. The post-JonBenet creep factor is actually worse than I had guessed, but it doesn’t ruin the movie.

And people like it. The film moved up to No. 4 on the weekend box-office Top 10 with a $9.6 million take. Its $35.7 million gross so far isn’t exactly in “Pirates of the Caribbean” territory, but it’s impressive for an indie. And the film has held its audience even as it has expanded. Its per-screen average of $6,009 is better than the three films ahead of itin the Top 10 (“Invincible,” “The Wicker Man,” “Crank”).

Other movie notes:

“The Covenant” dodges a bullet. We try to review these no-show cowards and post them on MySA.com ASAP. But we can’t do that this weekend, because Larry is heading to the Toronto Film Festival, where, presumably, he’ll get to see much better films. Look for him to blog like crazy and drink lots of coffee.

Because Mr. Ratliff has been so busy trying to take care of business before taking off to Toronto, he couldn’t make it to a screening of “The Protector.” Since none of the substitute Eberts saw it, we’re using Chicago Tribune staff writer Robert K. Elder’s review.